THE PUNK ROCK EDITORIAL

A guy named Matthew Strugar wrote this and he tours around with The
(International) Noise Conspiracy. He describes himself as "the guy who likes
to get naked." Need I say more?

Franco smiled in his grave this week in Spain! The fascist
tradition of the Spanish state attempted once again to crush anarchist
resistance to state and corporate power. And much like in 1936, the
police may have battered and beaten us, but the spirit of our struggle
remains.
The great institution of global capitalist interests, the World
Bank, had scheduled a meeting for June 25 and 26 in Barcelona, Spain,
quite possibly the one city in the world with the most impressive
anarchist resistance history. In accordance with their historical role,
the organizers of the protest to resist these meetings did such an
incredible job that the World Bank cancelled their meeting a month
early.
One meeting cancellation is not enough to appease us, and to prove
we are not simply reactionaries to the polices of these international
financial institutions, our convergence continued. Only now it had a
newly defined duel purpose; to put forward a platform of the new world
we desire, and to have an international celebration in the streets
Barcelona, eulogizing the fact that we had the capitalist pigs running
from their get-togethers.

On the 24th of July we met in conferences to discuss various
problems arising from a corporatized, globalized world, from
militarism to immigration, ecology to labor rights. Conferences
collectively drafted and approved declarations of global problems and
put forth forward thinking proposals for their correction.

The 25th we met for our celebration in the streets.
Anarcho-syndaclist red and black flags were flown high, and a British
Samba band led the march. Decor determines gestures, and Barcelona´s
beauty demands passion. Over 40,000 people showed their disgust with the
policies of the World Bank in the streets of Barcelona that day. Masked
anarchists ripped stones from the pavement and smashed the windows of
banks and multinational corporate stores. For a moment it looked like
there might be the return of the Durrudi Column, the anarchist army from
Barcelona that went from city to city in 1936 killing the capitalists
and politicians and informing the workers they were now in control of
their own lives. The majority of the protestors urged caution, however,
chanting ¨nonviolence¨ and knowing that property destruction is often a
pretext for police attacks.

After marching only one kilometer, we all assembled in the Placa
Catalunya to listen to speakers, enjoy music, and bask in the sun,
reveling in our small but important victory. But power will never
allow a victory power against itself! It must assert itself at all
moments. And in this case, it was in the form of thousands of riot
police amassing on the edge of our (now entirely) peaceful gathering.
After their lines had been completely formed, two ¨masked anarchists¨
starting fighting each other, and using the excuse that they needed to
break up a small scuffle, the police charged the protest, firing rounds
of rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd and beating anyone in their way.


The crowd of 40,000 people fled in terror. People fell to the
ground after being hit with rubber bullets and were trampled by
stampeding crowd. The police beat the fallen demonstrators.
Demonstrators would come together at different meeting places
throughout the city, only to be further terrorizes. One such meeting I
was a part of at the Placa Universitat. After about 500 of us gathered
and were simply discussing the horror of the police state, they charged
again. This time a group of approximately thirty police fired rubber
bullets and beat people with batons to disperse the crowd. As we ran
vans full of crazed pigs chased down unarmed fleeing people. The police
would throw open their van doors, and jump out of still moving vans,
pounding people with their batons, laughing an oily laugh the entire
time. In one incident, a demonstrator ran into a cafe to hide, and
the police ran into the cafe and beat a woman on the head who was
simply having espresso, having mistaken her for the demonstrator. She
lay on the ground bleeding and crying.

Attempting to take pictures of the police resulted in further
beatings by the police. Nonetheless, many pictures were taken and are
available on the Barcelona indymedia website (barcelona.indymedia.org).


A few hours into the police beatings, news camera footage
was released that showed that many of the masked anarchists breaking
windows during the march were actually police infiltrators. The police
put their own people into the march to incite property destruction, so
as to have the demonstrators look like thugs on the television camera.
The two masked men who began the scuffle in the park were also police
infiltrators, and their fight was only to give the amassed police for an
flimsy excuse to charge the protest. The police were even forced to
admit to their infiltration; a practice which is hardly new, but is
often hard to prove to mass media. The people of Barcelona and Catalonia
were outraged, the city is planning an investigation, and the fallout of
this brutality is just beginning to pan out.

The mayor of the city allowed the protestors to take back the
Placa Catalunya, our original meeting place, and barred the police from
entering. Sound systems were driven in, we danced and recovered, and
free vegan food was distributed to all, reminiscent of the People´s
Cantinas in 1936. The next day we marched on the stock exchange, that
great symbol of globalized capitalism, and the police seethed with rage
that they were not permitted to attack our peaceful march.

There is much more information available on the World Bank and the
demonstrations here in Barcelona at barcelona.indymedia.org . Letters to
the Spanish embassy in your country condemning the police violence
would also help the activists here very much.

With love and rage from Barcelona,
matthew strugar.

"this century has seen a few great incendiaries. today
they are dead, or finishing up preening in the
mirror... everywhere, youth (as it calls itself)
discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs,
under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its
shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble,
which it salutes with its oily laugh."

"and yet everyone wants to breathe and no one can
breathe and a lot of people say 'we'll be able to
breathe later.' and most people don't die, because
they're already dead."